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Thursday, March 31, 2011

Sir Gerald Kaufman mutters "Here we are, the Jews again" as a fellow MP rises to speak, but for the life of him, Sir Gerald cannot remember a thing

Sir Gerald Kaufman, M.P.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, Jewish but, as he is happy to report, a good friend of the late Yasser Arafat, has frequently suggested that Israel is just like Nazi Germany. He has also said that while he is not overly fond of Hamas he supports it as against Israel, since, as he puts it, Hamas reminds him of the Jews who fought against the Nazis.

As is well known, it is one of the central conceits of the JAIs ( Jews Against Israel) that they and they alone love the Jews and that is why they are against the "Zionists." Are they in fact anti-Semitic ? That is something often asked but always furiously denied by our JAIs, at least by those among them who have the ear of the press. No no no, the professed doctrine goes, we are not against the Jews, on the contrary. We are against the Zionists. Period.

Now yesterday, March 30, as the (pro-Israel) Labour MP Louise Ellman rose to speak in the House of Commons, Sir Gerald leaned over to other MP's nearby and said: "Here we are, the Jews again." Kaufman said later that he and Ellman often disagree. And what is it that they disagree about ? Is it that Ellman is a "Zionist" ? Well, not according to the plain language of his utterance, as it was heard by a number of MP's. What he does not like is that she is Jewish. The fact that he himself is also Jewish makes this kind of anti-Semitism illogical, but logic is a restraint only on people who are guided by a modicum of reason.

Sir Gerald's reasoning is poor, but so, apparently, is his memory. Interviewed by the press later, he said "I can't remember whether I said it or not. I can't remember every comment I said under my breath." Nevertheless, apparently under pressure from the Labour leadership, he had the following statement released: "I regret if any remarks I made in the chamber caused offence. If they did, I apologise." The word "if" appears not once but twice in this laconic non-apology.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Mr. Ilan Pappe -- together with Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and only very few others -- occupies the very highest echelon of Jewish haters of Israel: characters straight out of Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, totally oblivious, it would seem, to the comical side of their enterprise.

Now Mr. Pappe, as we learn from Wikipedia, "has been praised by Walid Khalidi, Richard Falk, Ella Shohat, Nur Masalha and John Pilger. Pilger describes Pappé as 'Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.'"Pappe has also co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky. Mr. Jeff Halper has had him lecture to his own followers. And -- what higher distinction can there be than this -- he has been cited, with very strong approval, by that great maven of Jewish perfidy, Ms. Jennifer Peto of the University of Toronto.

But Mr. Pappe has made a mistake that cost him dearly. He has not contented himself, as have certain others, with being an "activist" against Israel. No, he has allowed himself the conceit that he still is the historian he once was, a scholar, and he has masked his current propaganda with the externalities of scholarship. And once he did this he invited the scrutiny of scholars, and these have shown little mercy in proving him a malicious fabricator.

In particular: Benny Morris, a (somewhat) leftist historian at Ben Gurion University, has written some blistering reviews of Pappe's writings. The latest appears in The New Republic under date of April 11, 2011. I find this article to be a very substantial contribution to the understanding of the Jewish anti-Israel movement of our day: malice, willful ignorance, vanity. In the video below, Morris presents some of the material in a much condensed form.

Yet another Israeli professor has reviewed Pappe's writings, with similar findings: Prof. Yossi Ben-Artzi of Haifa University. See his review here.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

National Public Radio is not rabidly anti-Semitic. In this respect it is not like, say, Mr. David Duke or the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But NPR has its own version of a gentleman's polite anti-Semitism, something we ordinarily associate with upper-class clubs of England. And the New York Times isn't anti-Semitic at all, it's just not interested in the question.

Last week, in a sting operation, two of NPR's top executives -- Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley -- were caught on tape in an expensive restaurant huddling with people they thought were rich Muslims about to give them $5 million. Many embarrassing things were said by Ms. Liley and especially by Mr. Schiller, and much of it was reported by mainline media. But Mr. Schiller's anti-Semitic utterances were suppressed by most. A notable exception was ABC-TV, which came through in an honorable way. But not the NY Times ! It seems that where anti-Semitism is concerned, the Times likes to averts its eyes. Not fit to print in the NYT version of journalistic ethics.

Mr. Schiller has now been forced to resign from NPR as a result of these revelations. He violated the first law of gentlemanly anti-Semitism: do it, but don't get caught. As for Ms. Liley, she is on some sort of administrative leave, but, at least for now, she's still on board at NPR.

In the video that follows, note the genteel, self-satisfied, self-righteous, self-styled "liberal" mannerisms of Mr. S. And note his body language as he opines on this and that. No, no, no -- he will not accuse Jews of dominating all the media, only the print media. As for Ms. Liley, she really comes to life when she exclaims "I like that" in response to the ostensible Islamist's praise of NPR as "National Palestine Radio."